Apple Announces iBooks 2 And iBooks Author

At Apples education media event today, the company has announced iBooks 2, which is designed with education in mind, and Apple is looking to replace education text books with interactive digital books for the iPad.

Apple is hoping that iBooks 2 will change the way that students access education material, with interactive books which feature videos, animations and interactive graphics, instead of using text books.

These new education text books will be available to purchase from the iBooks 2 store direct from your iPad, and other iOS devices and iBooks 2 will be available as a free download from iTunes later today.

As well as announcing iBooks 2, Apple has also announced iBooks Author, which is a digital authoring tool for producing books for Apple’s iBooks platform.

iBooks Author comes with a change of Apple designed templates that you can choose from for your book , and it will work with Apple’s Keynote and Keynote presentations can be integrated into the iBook Author books.

Authors of the books will also be able to preview their books before publishing them to the iBooks Store, by connecting an iPad to their Mac, and then hitting preview in iBooks Author, the book will then appear on the iPad. Apple has also announced that iBooks Author will be available as a free download from today from the Mac App Store.

Probably the most significant part of the announcement is the price that Apple will charge for the education text books, each book will retail for $14.99 or less.